Before cpunks there was video...

[J.A. Terranson]

I found this treasure while trying to identify the specific video art 
workshop I was attending in 1968-1970, when I left to make exclusive use 
of my neighbors portapak (sony BW reel/reel on a backpack frame).  It's 
interesting in how the theories of the video arts community at the time 
saw the commercialization and democratization of video production much as 
we saw the creation of networks, protocols, and the all-mighty liberating 
cryptographic superstructure which would free us all.  In both cases I 
believe we have become slaves to our saviours, albeit with an improvement 
of the general welfare.

Enjoy.

//Alif

-- 
"Never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public
plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to
the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always
be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by
predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty."

Joseph Pulitzer, 1907 Speech
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Attention! Production! Audience.

Performing Video in the First Decade, 1968-1980
by Chris Hill

1. A radical communications paradigm for participatory democracy

The argument was not only about producing new form for new content, it was 
also about changing the nature of the relationship between reader and 
literary text, between spectator and spectacle, and the changing of this 
relationship was itself premised upon new ways of thinking about the 
relationship between art (or more generally 'representation') and 
reality...the adequacy or effectiveness of the devices employed depends 
entirely upon the historical moment or "conjecture" within which they are 
manifest. .Sylvia Harvey 1


a. Cultural Agency and new technology

Artists and social activists declared video a cultural praxis in the 
United States in the late '60s, a period of radical assertions fueled by a 
decade of civil rights confrontations, controversy surrounding U.S. 
involvement in Vietnam, and the rise of a new youth culture intent on 
consciousness expansion. Within a charged atmosphere of personal and 
social change and political confrontation, the production of culture was 
understood to be a necessary step in the development of a reinvigorated 
participatory democracy. The first issue of Radical Software (1970), a 
tabloid published by the New York media collective Raindance Corporation, 
asserted that video making and other "information software design" were 
radical cultural tools and proposed that, "Unless we design and implement 
alternate information structures which transcend and reconfigure the 
existing ones, our alternate systems and life styles will be no more than 
products of the existing process." 2

The video art and communications projects nurtured by this radical climate 
were fused into a cultural "movement" by the introduction to the U.S. 
market of the relatively affordable ($1500) and light weight half-inch 
open reel portapak in 1967-1968. In the half decade before the arrival of 
this mobile video production unit, art about television or its technology 
had entered the cultural imaginary through Fluxus artists' modified TV 
sets that challenged bourgeois televisual sensibilities, and art and 
technology exhibitions at major galleries. Speculation by the influential 
Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan on the parallel evolution of 
communications media and structures of consciousness fueled utopian 
conjecturing about a new information-based society. McLuhan's writing had 
particular impact on the post-war generation that grew up with television. 
In 1968 artists and social activists welcomed the new attentional terrain 
offered by the unintimidating, real-time video medium and the possibility 
of developing an accessible democratic communication system as an 
alternative to commercial television.

Unified by cultural imperatives for a more open and egalitarian way of 
living as well as by the pragmatic need to pool equipment.portapaks, 
microphones, and a growing assortment of independently engineered tools.a 
number of artists, activists, and electronic tool designers formed working 
collectives. Woody Vasulka described video in 1969-1970 as, "A very free 
medium, and the community was very young, naive, new, strong, cooperative, 
no animosities, kind of a welcoming tribe. So we ganged together west 
coast, east coast, Canadian west and east coasts, and we created overnight 
a spiritual community." 3

Even before the appearance of the portapak in the late '60s, sculptors, 
experimental filmmakers, painters, performers, musicians, and dancers had 
begun to seriously challenge long-held concepts about the formal 
separation of specific art disciplines and interpretive discourses. Some 
would eventually include video in their interdisciplinary investigations. 
Starting in the late 50s, Happenings expanded paintings into interactive 
environments, engaging those aspects of art which, "Consciously intended 
to replace habit with the spirit of exploration and experiment." 4 By the 
late '60s some members of the counterculture involved with the absorbing 
psychedelic underground of music, experimental film, theater, and light 
shows found video to be a provocative new moving image and installation 
medium. Sculptors who had been working within the emerging vocabulary of 
post-minimalism found video to be a medium with which they could 
foreground the phenomenology of perceptual or conceptual process over the 
aesthetic object or product. Artists participating in the "high" art 
gallery and museum spaces as well as those positioned in the clubs, 
concerts and mass cultural scenes found reasons to explore the new moving 
image and sync sound medium.

The manifestos and commentary by those caught up in the early video 
movement of 1968-1973 reflected an optimism stemming from the belief that 
real social change was possible; they expressed a commitment to cultural 
change that bordered on the ecstatic. During this heady period political 
theorists, artists, and activists delivered powerful arguments for a 
participatory democracy. The possibility of working for radical social 
change was conflated with the task of personal change and with imperatives 
to explore one's consciousness through music, art, drugs, encounter 
groups, spirituality, sexuality, and countercultural lifestyles. The 
valorization of "process" and "an almost religious return to experience" 
was shared by both political and cultural radicals of the late '60s, even 
though their agendas and strategies varied considerably. 5 Much of the 
enthusiasm expressed about the "process" available to artists and 
audiences through the new portable video technology centered on instant 
replay and immediate "feedback" of one's experience.

The social and cultural challenges of the '60s were, "A disruption of late 
capitalist ideology, political hegemony, and the bourgeois dream of 
unproblematic production." 6 The decade opened with the beginning of the 
civil disobedience phase of the civil rights movement and the formation of 
the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which organized 
interracial Freedom Rides to integrate restaurants and restrooms in the 
South in 1961. According to Todd Gitlin, sociologist and '60s activist, 
"The [civil rights] movement's rise and fall, its transmutations from 
southern nonviolence to black power, its insistence on the 
self-determination of the insulted and injured, was the template for every 
other movement of the decade." 7

Influenced by SNCC's egalitarianism, where middle class and poor struggled 
together, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1962 issued the Port 
Huron Statement which called for a "participatory democracy" based on 
"love and community in decisions shaping private lives." This New Left 
asserted that necessary social change would come about only by replacing 
institutions of control, not by reforming them. 8 The civil rights 
movement, SDS, the growing anti-war movement, and community organizing 
around urban poverty provided activist models that would challenge the 
generation coming of age in the mid-'60s to interrogate institutionalized 
authority, national priorities, and conventional expectations of personal 
satisfaction and class privilege. On college campuses teach-ins, 
information sharing, and local organizing around issues of housing, 
health, and legal rights offered practicums for a radically revised 
education for living. By 1968, 50% of the population was under 25, and 
across the country young people were swept up in the intoxication of the 
expanding and celebratory counterculture, its music, and its libertarian 
lifestyle choices. Although deep divisions between political radicals and 
lifestyle radicals remained throughout the decade, the country experienced 
a profound transformation of cultural relations in their wake.

As part of the progressive dialogue on college campuses between 1968 and 
1973, tracts by writers like Herbert Marcuse were broadly circulated and 
discussed. They described the media as a "consciousness industry" 
responsible for the alienation of the individual, the commodification of 
culture, and the centralized control of communications technologies. In 
his widely read books, One-Dimensional Man (1964) and An Essay on 
Liberation (1969), Herbert Marcuse identified a relationship between the 
consciousness of the individual and the political, asserting that "radical 
change in consciousness is the beginning, the first step in changing 
social existence: the emergence of a new Subject." This new citizen, aware 
of and actively dealing with "tragedy and romance, archetypal dreams and 
anxieties" would be less susceptible to "technical solutions" offered 
through contemporary society's homogeneous "happy consciousness." 9 
Marcuse's utopian ideas supported other mandates for consciousness 
expansion and change and validated the role that personal agency should 
play in accomplishing social change.

By 1969, through confrontation and consciousness raising.the sharing and 
study of personal experience and history.blacks and women declared 
themselves new historical "subjects." Strategizing around separatism and 
alliances, their liberation movements developed solidarity with other U.S. 
and international movements as global awareness permeated their public 
discourse. The gay rights movement, born after the 1969 Stonewall 
confrontation, and the American Indian Movement (AIM) also asserted 
political and cultural identities through public actions and networking 
during the early 19'70s. These new movements focused both on histories of 
economic exploitation and systemic cultural domination. The Port Huron 
Statement had demanded a less alienated society and claimed a definitive 
subjectivity for the generation coming of age in the '60s; these new 
movements also sought profound transformation in both socioeconomic and 
cultural relations.

Although the New Left and the anti-war movement in the late '60s had close 
ties with progressive documentary filmmakers, such as the film collective 
Newsreel, their information was disseminated by an extensive underground 
press.10 The Left learned to regard the mainstream media, including 
commercial television, with distrust. Planning for the 1968 anti-war 
protests in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention did include 
strategizing around national press coverage, but it was fringe groups like 
the Yippies that specifically sought confrontation with and coverage by 
commercial media. Forays into network broadcasting, such as the Videofreex 
collaboration with CBS on the aborted 1969 Subject to Change project 
revealed the industry's contradictory aspirations for new broadcast 
programming and reinforced alternative video makers' wariness of corporate 
television.

By the early '70s video theorists writing in Radical Software along with 
Marxist critics Todd Gitlin and German socialist Hans Magnus Enzensberger 
outlined arguments for an alternative, independent electronic media 
practice. In 1970, building on ideas developed earlier by Bertolt Brecht 
about the corporate structure of radio communications, Enzensberger 
critiqued the asymmetry between media producers/transmitters and media 
consumers/receivers. The radio and television industries had centralized 
and controlled access to the production, programming, and transmission of 
media, and limited those individual receivers to participation as 
consumers. However there was nothing inherent in the technology that could 
not support a more reciprocal communications system such as, for example, 
the telephone. Enzensberger concluded that new portable video technology 
set the stage for redressing this contradiction:

For the first time in history the media are making possible mass 
participation in a social and socialized productive process, the practical 
means of which are in the hands of the masses themselves. Such a use of 
them would bring the communications media, which up to now have not 
deserved the name, into their own. In its present form, equipment like 
television or film does not serve communication but prevents it. It allows 
no reciprocal action between transmitter and receiver; technically 
speaking, it reduces feedback to the lowest point compatible to the 
system. 11

Such political analysis was generally overshadowed at the time by the 
popular views of media theorist Marshall McLuhan, whose books on the 
history of communications technologies were widely discussed by the 
national media. McLuhan wrote in Understanding Media (1964) that human 
history was a succession of technological extensions of human 
communication and perception where each new medium subsumed the previous 
technology, sometimes as an art form. Through the inherent speed and 
immediacy of electronic video technology, television had become an 
extension of the human nervous system. His notion of television's 
"flowing, unified perceptual events" bringing about changes in 
consciousness spoke directly to the contemporary psychedelic drug 
experience as well as to artists experimenting with new electronic 
visualizations. His aphorism "the medium is the message" suggested that 
consciousness change was brought about primarily through formal changes in 
communications technologies rather than the specific content delivered by 
those media, which resonated with the concentrated formalist 
investigations practiced in the contemporary arts.

Although McLuhan's and others' prescriptions for technological utopia 
appeared poetic to many, he popularized the notion of television, a "high 
participation" as a generational marker and as a potentially liberatory 
information tool in the hands of the first generation that had grown up 
with it. McLuhan did not address ways of restructuring a more democratic 
telecommunications system, but he inspired others to apply his ideas to 
using the new video medium.

The belief that new technologies would inspire and generate the foundation 
for a new society was underwritten in part by the American post-war 
investment in the grand cultural imperative of science, which had brought 
about the international green revolution in agriculture and the space 
race. Americans had landed on the moon in 1969, in the "biggest show in 
broadcast history." 12 The rational spirit of science resonated in a 
series of art and technology exhibitions at major museums. Critic Susan 
Sontag articulated this "new sensibility" in the arts:

What gives literature its preeminence is its heavy burden of 'content,' 
both reportage and moral judgment...But the model arts of our time are 
actually those with much less content, and a much cooler mode of moral 
judgment - like music, films, dance, architecture, painting, sculpture. 
The practice of these arts.all of which draw profusely, naturally, and 
without embarrassment, upon science and technology.are the locus of the 
new sensibility. In fact there can be no divorce between science and 
technology, on the one hand, and art, on the other, any more than there 
can be a divorce between art and the forms of social life. 13

Enthusiasm about new technologies.computers and the information-based 
society they might anticipate, and theorizing on human evolution, 
cybernetics, human perception, ecology, and transformable 
environments.appeared at a time when post-war economic growth generated 
confidence and society seemed to be capable of radical change. Through the 
writing of McLuhan, Norbert Wiener, Buckminster Fuller, Gregory Bateson 
and others 14 the intersection of information and systems theory with 
biological models provided intellectual references about communications 
and human potential for a generation that had grown up with the increasing 
availability of powerful and expressive personal tools.cars, televisions, 
transistor radios, 35mm and 8mm movie cameras, electronic musical 
instruments, and now video cameras. The mixed metaphors of science, 
biology, and revolution, dubbed "cyber-scat" by critic David Antin 15 are 
evident in Michael Shamberg's description of "Media-America":

It may be that unless we re-design our television structure, our own 
capacity to survive as a species may be diminished. For if the character 
of our culture is defined by its dominant communications medium, and that 
medium is an overly centralized, low-variety system, then we will succumb 
to those biologically unviable characteristics. Fortunately 
techno-evolution has spawned new video modes like portable videotape, 
cable television, and videocassettes which promise to restore a 
media-ecological balance to TV. 16

b. Early video collectives and access to cable and public broadcast TV

The video collectives that formed between 1968-1971 embraced the new 
portable video technology and assumptions about the need for cultural and 
social change that could include humanely reconfigured technologies. The 
individual groups were bonded by the practical need to share technical 
resources, and to collaborate on the many tasks required for productions. 
Some of the video collectives functioned as communes, with members living 
together as well as working regularly with video. Parry Teasdale, a member 
of the Videofreex, recalled "the video medium ...was part of the concept 
of enjoyment as well as experimentation, as well as art, as well as 
politics, all those things." 17 Philip Mallory Jones described his 
involvement with the Ithaca video community, initially as a member of a 
video-producing commune:

"For me it was a two way thing. There was the individual vision and the 
individual maker working with a set of tools to do something. The tools 
were something I could get access to one way or another, without a lot of 
money. The other concern was the serious business of making revolution. 
These things were not separated. These things were a part of everybody 
else's concern too." 18

The expansion of these various collectives into an informal national 
network of producers with common interests can be traced through the 
"Feedback" sections of the early issues of Radical Software, published by 
the New York City collective Raindance. The masthead from the first issue 
articulates the broad aspirations of the editors' proposed cultural 
intervention: "Videotape can be to television what writing is to language. 
And television, in turn, has subsumed written language as the globe's 
dominant communications medium. Soon accessible VTR [video tape recorder] 
systems and videocassettes (even before CATV [cable antenna television] 
opens up) will make alternate networks a reality." 19

Manifestos about making video with portapaks and practical user 
information were made available through publications like Radical Software 
(1970-1976) which reported on video-making initiatives in art, education, 
psychotherapies, and community building. Hands-on technical guides like 
Spaghetti City Video Manual (1973) and Independent Video (1974) 
demystified the technology, encouraging independent problem-solving and 
self-sufficiency with video tools. These publications were critical in 
promoting a vision of radicalized personal communications, providing an 
education for the unsophisticated and curious, and identifying a network 
of fellow enthusiasts. Their pragmatic approach to the present and 
sometimes utopian visions for the future were shared by others who 
examined and challenged the delivery of basic institutional 
systems.education, communications, government, health.and envisioned new 
grassroots configurations which often centered on new or reconfigured 
technologies. The first edition of the widely referenced Whole Earth 
Catalog (1969) begins with a section on "understanding whole systems," 
including communications, featuring descriptions of Super-8 filmmaking and 
audio synthesizer construction and describing the role that accessing and 
understanding tools might play in a new society:

"So far, remotely driven power and glory.as via government, big business, 
formal education, church--has succeeded to the point where gross defects 
obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains, a 
realm of intimate, personal power is developing.power of the individual to 
conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own 
environment, and share adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that 
aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog." 20

Most of the early video collectives developed projects which articulated 
production and reception as essential structural components of their 
telecommunications visions, reflecting a pragmatic need for new exhibition 
venues that would accommodate video makers' aspirations as well as the 
period's recognition of the politicization of culture. Specific audience 
feedback structures were envisioned which exercised portable video's 
capacity to render real time documentations of everyday events, perceptual 
investigations, and experimental tech performances. These structural 
concerns combined with the imprecision of early video editing initially 
overshadowed the production of a singular tape. The work of the early 
collectives reveals their acknowledgement of video as social 
relations.managing or guiding the attention of viewers, directly engaging 
viewers in some aspect of the expressive, performative or production 
process, and educating audiences as new users. The often-stated goal of 
radicalized communications was further reflected in the early collectives' 
strategies for the distribution of information they produced. Tape 
libraries, tape exchanges, and mobile services were established, the print 
media.journals and books.were considered important adjunct communications 
"software," experimental video labs and theaters accommodated interactive 
screenings, and transmission using low power broadcast, cable television, 
and public broadcast television was explored.

The diverse "cultural data banks" inventoried in the early issues of 
Radical Software were maps of the counter cultural imagination of the 
time, such as: "Dick Gregory speaking at San Jose State College 11/69" by 
Electric Eye; Eric Siegel's tapes made with his Psychedelevision color 
video synthesizer; "a tour of el barrio by a Minister of the Young Lord's 
Party" and "Gay Liberation Day" by People's Video Theater.21 Enzensberger 
recognized the radical potential of video data banks to be a 
"memory-in-readiness" for a changing society, and contrasted it with 
class-based notions of intellectual "heritage."22 These pioneering 
recordings were documentations of the counterculture, by the 
counterculture. Like home movies, they were a collection of personal 
experiences, but unlike those private records, these tapes were 
contributions to an information bank from which anyone could draw, where 
no one person was specifically credited with having produced the tape. The 
contents of the video libraries posted in Radical Software were not 
commodities for sale, but participated in an alternative cultural economy 
that valued information exchange for imaging a new society.

The cultural exchange performed through the production/reception 
configurations of early collectives' projects varied according to specific 
agendas and sites of operation. In New York, Raindance Corporation was the 
video movement's self-described research and development organization. 
Raindance also was responsible for Radical Software (1970-74), the chief 
networking tool and theoretical organ, Guerrilla Television (1971) by 
Michael Shamberg, and Video Art: An Anthology (1976), edited by Ira 
Schneider and Beryl Korot.

People's Video Theater was founded by Ken Marsh, an artist working with 
light shows, and Elliot Glass, a language teacher videotaping his 
students' conversations in Spanish-speaking neighborhoods in New York. 
They videotaped interviews and events on the streets of New York during 
the day and invited interviewees to their loft "theater" in the evening 
for screenings and further discussions as part of "activating the 
information flow."23 PVT's interactions took the form of community 
"mediations" where points of view on a particular issue would be 
researched and recorded, then played back for politicians, community 
leaders, and neighborhood people as part of the negotiating process. Ken 
Marsh regarded video production at the time as an aspect of citizenship. 
"The rhetoric that we subscribed to was that 'the people are the 
information'... Everybody could do it and everybody should do it. That was 
the mandate-pick it up, it's there. Like the power to vote-vote, take 
responsibility. Make it and see it."24

Video Free America documented the West Coast counterculture-including 
Buckminster Fuller's World Games in Washington state and a yoga festival 
in Golden Gate Park-and these tapes were screened to audiences at their 
production and exhibition facility in San Francisco. After shooting a 
frisbee competition as a parody of television sports coverage, Arthur 
Ginsberg had the idea of examining the porn industry, which developed into 
an ongoing video veriti installation on love, marriage, and living with 
media, Carel and Ferd, a countercultural precursor of the controversial 
PBS documentary series An American Family.

In 1972, the Videofreex, a New York City collective, moved to the 
Catskills, renamed themselves Media Bus, and began broadcasting live and 
recorded programming each week over a low power, pirate TV station to 
their tiny community in Lanesville, New York. Visitors interested in using 
their editing system or viewing tapes from their extensive library were 
welcomed at their communal home, Maple Tree Farm. Media Bus travelled 
around New York state giving workshops in live and recorded video 
production for artists, educators, and civic officials.

Another seminal group formed around experimental filmmaker and dancer 
Shirley Clarke; her T.P. Video Space Troupe (NY) produced interactive 
exercises and events using video, dance, and performance, which served as 
a video training model. One of Clarke's exercises, with local social 
service projects and screened their sometimes controversial a sunrise 
project, concluded when participants reconvened at her Chelsea Hotel 
rooftop apartment at sunrise to replay the evening's portapak 
documentation of New York's nightlife. A little further west, the Ithaca 
video commune collaborated programming in bars and bookstores, generating 
discussion about local and national issues as well as educating local 
audiences to the possibilities of portable video. Philip Mallory Jones and 
others eventually initiated the Ithaca Video Festival, the first touring 
video festival (1974-1984) and an important showcase for early video art 
and documentary.

At Antioch College in Ohio an active national tape exchange was maintained 
by students through their Community Media Center. At the Antioch Free 
Library people were welcome to borrow tapes or add their own tapes to the 
collection. Through the college's alternating semesters of work and school 
and its new program in communications, media students became actively 
involved in planning and establishing public access cable operations all 
over the country.

Alongside the inspiration of the portapak, the burgeoning cable television 
industry was heralded as a promising technological development by artists 
writing in Radical Software, as well as community activists, and urban 
policy planners. Portable video technology could introduce 
non-professional people to production, and cable television companies 
which contracted with individual municipalities could use their local 
systems to disseminate citizen-generated and community-responsive 
programming. Public access provisions were understood as incentives to 
potential municipal clients by cable companies, anxious to expand into new 
markets in the early '70s, and as a negotiated resource in exchange for 
the companies receiving access to municipal infrastructures (utility 
poles, right-of-way to lay cable) by public policy planners and community 
media activists. Citizens' access to cable TV could begin to develop the 
media voices for those largely unrepresented by commercial television, as 
well as encourage cultural consumers to become cultural producers.

In a 1970 issue of The Nation, Ralph Lee Smith chronicled the competition 
among broadcast TV, cable TV, and the telephone companies for a "wired 
nation." Smith cited post-war federal commitment to building the 
interstate highway system as a precedent for mandating similar planning in 
the public interest for the development of an "electronic highway" in the 
'70s. Smith's prescient article concluded:

"It is hard to assign a dollar value to many or most of the educational, 
cultural, recreational, social and political benefits that the nation 
would receive from a national communications highway. It is easier to 
assert the negative-that the nation probably cannot afford not to build 
it...It cannot be assumed that all the social effects of the cable will be 
good. For example...the cable will make it less and less necessary for the 
more affluent population of the suburbs to enter the city, either for work 
or recreation. Lack of concern and alienation could easily deepen, with 
effects that could cancel the benefits of community expression that the 
cable will bring to inner-city neighborhoods. At the very least, such 
dangerous possibilities must be foreseen, and the educational potential of 
the cable itself must be strongly marshaled to meet them..."25

The "benefits of community expression" cited by Smith are echoed in 
"Minority Cable Report," written for Televisions magazine. Roger Newell 
argued for minorities' stake in the cable business and community projects 
that would keep the public informed and also "operationally involved." He 
pointed out that in the findings of the 1968 National Advisory Commission 
on Civil Disorder (the Kerner Commission), "Blacks interviewed by 
investigators for the commission felt that the media could not be trusted 
to present the true story of conditions that led to the riots." 
Furthermore, "proponents of the use of cable in minority communities saw 
it as the clear alternative to commercial broadcasting ... Cable gives us 
a second-and perhaps last-chance to determine whether television can be 
used to teach, to inspire, to change humans' lives for the better. The 
task will be demanding and expensive."26

The movement to develop public access to cable in the United States 
initially centered around New York University's Alternative Media Center 
(AMC) and George Stoney, who had directed the Canadian National Film 
Board's Challenge for Change from 1968-1970, a project which encouraged 
"community animation" by training people to use media to represent 
themselves and local issues to government agencies. Dorothy Henaut and 
Bonnie Klein describe the investment of citizens participating in 
Challenge for Change in the first issue of Radical Software:

"Half-inch video allows complete control of the media by the people of a 
community. They can use the camera to view themselves and their 
neighborhood with a new and more perceptive eye; they can do interviews 
and ask the questions more pertinent to them; they can record discussions; 
they can edit tapes designed to carry a particular message to a particular 
audience-an audience they have chosen and invited themselves." 27


Stoney worked with other video activists taking portapaks into New York 
City neighborhoods, strategizing with city officials, federal regulators 
and cable companies, and speaking out at public hearings about the need to 
establish diversity of programming voices in order to prevent cable from 
becoming a copy of commercial broadcasting. In 1970 Stoney and Red Burns 
founded the Alternate Media Center at New York University with support 
from the Markle Foundation and, shortly thereafter, the National Endowment 
for the Arts, to train organizers to work with interested community 
groups, cable companies, and city governments to develop public access to 
cable TV around the country. Descriptions of tapes made by Alternate Media 
Center interns in Washington Heights, one of the first neighborhoods in 
Manhattan to be cabled, indicate their commitment to process-oriented 
productions and the viability of community participation in cable 
television:

Tape 190: Black Response to Riots 9/25/71. Cabled: Teleprompter, Sept 14, 
16, 18. Because of an article in the NY Times about Dominican and black 
gangs fighting, Joel went up to 164th St. and Amsterdam Ave. to see if 
videotape could be used in any way to help in this situation possibly by 
using tape to get information to both sides, possibly putting this 
information on public access to bring the communities' attention to this 
incident. It was the first time Joel had gone out alone, so he gave the 
mike to the people because he had no partner to take sound. At the 
beginning, Joel asked questions, but then the people just started relating 
to each other and totally ignored Joel. He felt they really wanted to get 
something out and had a strong need to speak. He played the tape back for 
the people through the camera and they dug it...The stereotyped image of a 
Black voice is destroyed by the information on the tape showing the 
difference of views. People talk to each other as well as to the camera. 
28

In 1972 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), under the leadership 
of Nicholas Johnson, issued regulations which required every cable system 
with 3,500 or more subscribers to originate local programming and to 
provide one dedicated, non-commercial public access channel, available 
without charge at all times on a first-come, first-served, 
non-discriminatory basis to carry that programming. At that time the cable 
industry had a 7% penetration of U.S. households. This legislation 
provided the groundwork from which citizens, municipalities, or cable 
companies could initiate public access programming, and establish 
equipment and training resource centers all over the country.

Cable access facilities typically supported local production by providing 
consumer video equipment, training, and programming access to cable 
channels; they were funded primarily by mandated fees paid by cable 
companies to cities. In 1976 former AMC interns established the National 
Federation for Local Cable Programmers (NFLCP), an umbrella organization 
whose newsletters and conferences generated communication and ongoing 
education within the growing number of centers. The NFLCP continued to 
support citizens, municipalities and cable companies interested in 
initiating public access to cable facilities around the country, and their 
legislative and grass roots advocacy impacted significantly on national 
communications legislation throughout the decade. By 1986 there were over 
1,200 public access facilities in the United States, actively supporting 
productions and programming by the public on cable TV. 29

Although cable could reach potentially large television audiences, not all 
communities were cabled. And because cable companies charged viewers, many 
households chose not to subscribe. Local public television stations were 
also potential distribution outlets for video producers. The stand-alone 
time base corrector appeared on the market in 1973; by stabilizing the 
signal of 1/2" open reel tapes, it effectively ended technological 
objections to broadcasting portable video. As video began to replace film 
for news productions, independents using portable video equipment began 
calling for more diversity in points of view, challenging existing union 
policies as well as programming policies. Video groups began working with 
local PBS stations-Portable Channel with WXXI in Rochester (New York) and 
University Community Video with KTCA in Minneapolis-to produce news and 
documentaries specifically for local broadcast audiences. Technical 
developments-portability, color video, 3/4" U-matic cassette format, CMX 
computer video editing-all enhanced video production throughout the decade 
while raising a complex of issues around independents' access to new 
technologies and broadcast TV's audiences.

Public libraries were pioneers of community video activity-extending their 
mission by loaning out portapaks, collecting and screening tapes, and 
advocating for public access to cable. Public libraries in Port 
Washington, the Cattaraugus-Chautauqua Public Library in Jamestown, and 
Donnell Library in New York City, became notable sites for videotape 
production and dissemination. Port Washington Public Library's video 
director Walter Dale asked the questions: "Could the library maintain in 
the area of video those qualities it fought for in print; namely, the 
right to read all views and expressions? Could the library become a true 
catalyst for the free market place of visual as well as printed 
expressions?" 30 To Dale, the answer was yes.

Reflecting back on the formative period (1968-1973) both technological 
utopians and social historians testified to an inspired engagement with 
the possibilities of a new society. Hans Magnus Enzensberger commented on 
1968, when "... utopian thinking seemed to meet the material conditions 
for its own realization. Liberation had ceased to be a mere wishful 
thought. It appeared to be a real possibility." 31 Videofreex member Parry 
Teasdale recalled the imperative to make a commitment: "Without 
understanding the dynamics of the war in Vietnam and what that did to 
society; I don't think you can understand video ... it spawned the 
technology and it created the necessary groundwork for an adversarial 
relationship within the society that defined sides so clearly that people 
could choose and choose righteously to be a part of something." 32 Ralph 
Lee Smith looked back on his first encounter with advocates for public 
access cable TV: "Those people were.applying not just technology but 
appropriate technology. That is to say they were adopting enough of the 
technology, at a level of expression which was just adequate to do the job 
and no more, to achieve what they wanted to achieve...They were way ahead 
of their time." 33 Woody Vasulka recalled a time when many welcomed, "A 
new society that would be based on a new model ... a drive for personal 
enlightenment ... the possibility of transcendence through image as an 
actual machine-made evocation ... Some thought of this as a healing 
process or ... a restructuring of one's consciousness." 34

Despite the limits to change eventually encountered by the early video 
practitioners, widespread questioning of fundamental ideological and 
lifestyle choices did inspire the invention of experimental community 
structures and economies founded on the use value of media production. 
Such emphatic commitments focused a radical subjectivity which identified 
itself as an alternative to the "alienated" and spiritually bankrupt 
bureaucratic mainstream. Collectives and networked individuals invented 
new cultural forms and nourished an energy which focused, invigorated, and 
sustained productive social scenes. Existing institutions-television 
networks, museums, schools, libraries-were challenged to respond to the 
interests and needs of their audiences, markets, and users. Optimistic 
about the role the new media technology could play in a new society, these 
early video tribes committed themselves to the performance of a radically 
de-centralized and potentially more democratic electronic communication 
practice. This alternative vision of decentralized media culture(s) was 
funded starting in the early '70s as not-for-profit artists projects, 
artist-run spaces, video access centers, and public access cable 
facilities by federal, state and local arts councils, private foundations, 
public television and cable companies.

c. Invisible histories- reconstructing a picture of decentralized media 
practice

Few of the tapes from the immense body of work produced by these early 
collectives and access projects have been restored and are available 
today. Most open reel tapes from this period are in desperate need of 
preservation. Archivist Roger House recently described "Inside Bed-Stuy," 
one of the first black-produced community access shows (1968) as revealing 
"a community in the midst of trying to speak to itself, articulate its 
needs, appreciate its creativity, and urge its residents to rise to the 
challenges of the times." He commented on "how healthy it was to see 
average people of all ages, in splendid plainness of speech and 
appearance, speaking out on the Vietnam war, unemployment, urban blight, 
black capitalism, and black power." 35 Much research is needed to 
identify, recover, and evaluate a comprehensive history of the alternative 
video culture from this period.

Videotaped documentation of community "process" set out to establish a 
media vocabulary for a new way of speaking in American society. Why have 
so many of these tapes been relegated to the back shelves of social and 
educational institutions and producers' attics? Part of the answer lies in 
the social and institutional dynamics of any cultural scene. Almost any 
cultural production, whether destined for a museum or a living room via 
public access cable, depends on intersecting social and institutional 
systems that construct the motivation for the work's production, and the 
distribution or exhibition vehicle which connects it with an audience, all 
contributing to its value and meaning. In working to establish a 
decentralized media practice that had more to do with practice and process 
than product, especially in the early '70s, producers consciously 
positioned themselves on the cultural margins. Many of these early 
initiatives were undertaken by members of minority groups or 
geographically isolated communities, which had never established cultural 
currency outside their local scenes.

Many of these early communications projects were intended to be 
narrow-casted to specific audiences, and conceived essentially to 
intersect with locally constructed social and cultural territory. Are 
these challenges to existing limitations imposed by class, race, age, and 
gender less legible today? Contemporary viewers may require a context 
explaining the previous generation.s commitment to process, lack of 
narrative closure, and rough editing.

Cultural theorist Fredric Jameson claimed at the end of the '70s:

"Authentic cultural creation is dependent for its existence on authentic 
collective life, on the vitality of the 'organic' social group in whatever 
form...[The] only authentic cultural production today has seemed to be 
that which can draw on the collective experience of marginal pockets of 
the social life of the world system...and this production is possible only 
to the degree to which these forms of collective life or collective 
solidarity have not yet been fully penetrated by the market and by the 
commodity system." 36

Jameson cites women's literature, black literature, and British working 
class rock as examples of this authentic collective life, but the 
alternative video scenes efforts to realize a new citizen-based, 
locally-responsive media culture across the United States at the time 
would also qualify.

2. Video art practice and its interpretive strategies

"A few years ago Jonas Mekas closed a review of a show of videotapes with 
an aphorism to the effect that film is an art but video is a god. I 
coupled the remark, somehow, with another, of Ezra Pound's; that he 
understood religion to be "just one more unsuccessful attempt to 
popularize art." Recently though I have sensed a determination on the part 
of video artists to get down to the work of inventing their art, and 
corroborating their faith in good works...A large part of that work of 
invention is, I take it, to understand what video is." .Hollis Frampton 37

"Perceptual and structural changes...have to go with relevance rather than 
forms. And the sense of a new relevance is the aspect that quickly fades. 
Once a perceptual change is made, one does not look at it but uses it to 
see the world. It is only visible at the point of recognition of the 
change. After that, we are changed by it but have also absorbed it. The 
impossibility of reclaiming the volitivity of perceptual change leaves art 
historical explanations to pick the bones of dead forms. In this sense, 
all art dies with time and is impermanent whether it continues to exist as 
an object or not." .Robert Morris 38

a. Post-minimalist perceptual relevance

Although they often remarked on the pleasure of working in aesthetic 
territory that was open to new gestures and a new critical vocabulary, the 
first artists to explore new video technology in the late '60s were 
educated through minimalism's measured structures and procedures and 
shared late modernism's investment of the "real" in the materials of art 
making. The mid-'60s saw a shift if not a crisis in contemporary modern 
art predicated on a radical reassessment of aesthetic foundations and a 
politicized evaluation of the institutional delivery system for art. 
Critic Clement Greenberg's reigning tenets of post-war modernism argued 
that art was, "An escape from ideas, which were infecting the arts with 
the ideological struggles of society," and that, in contemporary art, "A 
new and greater emphasis upon form...involved the assertion of the arts as 
independent vocations, disciplines, and crafts, absolutely autonomous, and 
entitled to respect for their own sakes..." 39 This description of an art 
object, whose integrity was specific to a discipline and which was 
intended to be appreciated in isolation from the complex social and 
cultural contexts of its making, had begun to be challenged in the late 
'50s. The multi-disciplinary, participatory nature of Happenings, the 
invasion of mass media via parody in Pop Art, and the aberrant humor of 
"intermedia" Fluxus projects fractured audience expectations of what had 
been considered normative conditions for art making. While many modernist 
artists began the '70s by investigating the "essential" properties of 
video, by the end of the decade the confluence of "high" and "low" art 
forms, the performance of radical subjectivities, and shifting attitudes 
toward cinema, television and narrative would set in motion competing 
cultural agendas for video-makers.

By the mid-'60s painters, sculptors, filmmakers, musicians, and dancers 
were not only embracing interdisciplinary work but also contributing 
important critical perspectives, articulating their own working 
assumptions in major art journals like Artforum. Fluxus artist Dick 
Higgins argued in 1965 for the "populism" and "dialogue" of "intermedia" 
and against "the concept of the pure medium, the painting or precious 
object of any kind." 40 Conceptual art, articulated by artists like Sol 
LeWitt, minimized the importance of objecthood altogether in the aesthetic 
exercise. Participating in this debate critic Michael Fried wrote in 1967 
that, "In previous [modern] art what is to be had from the work is located 
strictly within it," and the art object should occupy a privileged 
meditative space. He objected to the "degenerative theatricality" of new 
process-oriented works of art that acknowledged the viewer and were 
"concerned with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters 
work." 41 However other critics, such as Annette Michelson, heralded 
post-minimalism for acknowledging "temporality as the condition or medium 
of human cognition and aesthetic experience." 42 And Lizzie Borden pointed 
out that the value of considering the perceptual phenomenology of an art 
event "underline[d] its actual way of working with the viewer" which 
amounted to the "liberation of the art object from the idealization of 
critical theory." 43

Sculptor, performer, and sometime video-maker Robert Morris traced the 
shift from his early minimalist project of describing objecthood to a 
post-minimalist articulation of the new "landscape" of material and 
perceptual processes:

"What was relevant to the '60s was the necessity of reconstituting the 
object as art. Objects were an obvious first step away from illusionism, 
allusion and metaphor... [However] object making has now given way to an 
attention to substance...substances in many states-from chunks, to 
particles, to slime, to whatever...Alongside this approach is chance, 
contingency, indeterminacy-in short, the entire area of process...This 
reclamation of process refocuses art as an energy driving to change 
perception...What is revealed is that art itself is an activity of change, 
of disorientation and shift, of violent discontinuity and mutability, of 
the willingness for confusion even in the service of discovering new 
perceptual modes." 44

This attention to the process of working with specific materials and art 
making as a way of changing perception itself constituted "a dialectic 
between structure and meaning which is...sensitive to its own needs in its 
realization." 45 This phenomenological dialogue was articulated through an 
essentially formal vocabulary that attempted to focus precise attention on 
fundamental structures and procedures involved in producing work, more 
akin to science than poetics. Experimental filmmaker Paul Sharits 
described the critical vocabulary brought to bear on non-narrative film of 
the '60s, a way of speaking about work which was adopted by the early 
video makers:

It is noteworthy that during the 1950s and 1960s a relatively successful 
vocabulary ("formalism") was employed by critics of painting and 
sculpture. It was a mode which by-passed the artists' intentions, 
dismissed "poetic" interpretations, and focused on apt descriptions of the 
art object; the aim was a certain discrete "objectivity." 46

Experimental film, like sculpture and painting, had been grounded in 
modernism's materials-based formal vocabulary and was strictly 
anti-illusionist (vis a vis the Hollywood narrative), and video makers 
would assume this bias for their camera-based medium as well. Filmmaker 
Malcolm LeGrice commented on experimental film's investment in the 
descriptive reality of physical materials and viewers' perception in 1977: 
"The historical development of abstract and formal cinema ... seeks to be 
'realist' in the material sense. It does not imitate or represent reality, 
nor create spurious illusions of times, places and lives which engage the 
spectator in a vicarious substitute for his own reality." 47

Artists and critics were re-examining fundamental assumptions about modern 
art which for decades had been isolated within a personal contemplative 
moment and removed from popular culture and mass media. Hermine Freed 
remarked:

"Just when pure formalism had run its course; just when it became 
politically embarrassing to make objects, but ludicrous to make nothing; 
just when many artists were doing performance work but had nowhere to 
perform, or felt the need to keep a record of their performance;...just 
when it became clear that TV communicates more information to more people 
than large walls do; just when we understood that in order to define space 
it is necessary to encompass time, just when many established ideas in 
other disciplines were being questioned and new models were proposed, just 
then the portapak became available." 48

b. Immediacy, process, feedback

In step with late modernism's imperative to explore the essential 
properties of materials, video makers were initially rhapsodic about the 
inherent properties of the medium, such as immediacy and real time 
feedback. Compared to film, videotape was inexpensive, immediate, and 
recyclable like audiotape. Editing videotape between 1968-1971 was 
primitive; aesthetic strategies and narrative constructions that relied on 
precise editing emerged only with the development of more sophisticated 
editing equipment and eventually access programs available through media 
art centers, TV labs, and public access centers. During this early period, 
the simultaneous recording and exhibition of events in "real time" or the 
real time "synthesis" of images using analog electronic instruments 
dictated the structure of the work. Early tapes using these time-based 
instruments foregrounded duration itself, along with the mapping of 
attention over time, and relationships between space/time and sound/time. 
Critic David Antin discussed at length early video makers' calculated 
denial of the attentional framework, or "money metric," of television. 49 
Joanna Gill, writing for the Rockefeller Foundation in 1975, described 
these early video works as "information/perception pieces," projects 
determined to expand the limits of viewers' ability to perceive themselves 
in video-mediated environments. 50

The mapping of perceptual, social and/or technological "processes" was 
valorized above the tape as an art "product." Early video projects often 
took the form of installations-configuring cameras, monitors, and/or 
recording decks with immediate or delayed playback, a common adaptation of 
an open reel tape recorder accomplished by creating a tape loop between 
the record and playback heads on one or more decks. Wipe Cycle, a 
multi-monitor installation by Ira Schneider and Frank Gillette, part of 
Howard Wise's historic 1969 exhibition TV as a Creative Medium, featured 
an 8-second tape loop whereby people entering the gallery encountered 
delayed images of their own arrival played back to them on a bank of 
monitors. The artists described the installation as an "information 
strobe" in which "the most important thing was the notion of information 
presentation, and the notion of the integration of the audience into the 
information." 51 Antin, writing about this installation said that "what is 
attempted is the conversion (liberation) of an audience (receiver) into an 
actor (transmitter)." 52

Other artists pursued these ideas throughout the decade. Dan Graham, for 
example, structured "consciousness projections" which featured technical 
and human feedback and delay systems in which the audience could explore 
its apprehension of present and past time, subjective and objective 
information. Graham wrote:

"Video is a present time medium. Its image can be simultaneous with its 
perception by/of its audience (it can be the image of its audience 
perceiving).video feeds back indigenous data in the immediate, 
present-time environment or connects parallel time/space continua. 53 
Through the use of videotape feedback and tape delay the performer and the 
audience, the perceiver and his process of perception, are linked, or 
co-identified. The difference between intention and actual behaviour is 
fed back on the monitor and immediately influences the observer's future 
intentions and behaviour. By linking perception of exterior behaviour and 
its interior, mental perception, an observer's 'self', like a topological 
moebius strip, can be apparently without 'inside' or 'outside.'" 54

Video artists exploited the phenomenon of video "feedback," a specific 
artifact of video tools, accomplished by pointing a video camera at a 
monitor which produces an infinite tunnelling or mirroring effect. Besides 
being an easily produced and mesmerizing psychedelic effect, feedback 
expressed an essential concept in information systems theory. The feedback 
effect was a powerful metaphor for the ability of a self-monitoring 
information system to function as an organic or self-regulating physical 
system. It was invoked by artists in investigations of duration, 
information exchange and modification, the phenomenology of self and the 
everyday, and relationships with audiences. Strategies using information 
feedback were also employed by community activists interested in models of 
participatory social mediation and political advocacy where citizens could 
represent themselves and deliver their messages as a kind of extended 
dialogue with public officials on video, the image currency of the time.

The portability and unity of image and sound represented by the portapak 
meant that the video cameraperson could approach documentation in terms of 
his or her ability to enter into a relational process with a constantly 
evolving situation. Bob Devine commented on how the attention of the 
cameraperson constructed the event:

"There are qualities which distinguish the sort of tape in which resonance 
or receptivity predominates. The takes tend to be unbroken. The point of 
view has the unity of a single continuous interactive perspective. The 
camera moves through and among; it does not define space with fronts, 
backs, sides or even frame-edges, but instead "occupies" the interior of 
the space and presents a structural awareness of that interior. The camera 
is distractible; it reacts, is drawn through attention to particular 
features or interactions. The tape represents a record of the focus of 
receptive attention in the taping context. Attention is edited in 
real-time." 55

c. The electronic material of video and the development of tools

Artists working directly with the technologically charged environment of 
this time-based medium generated a discourse celebrating the particular 
processes of electronic image-construction. The video camera transforms 
light and sound information into the video and audio signals as waveform, 
frequency and voltage, which can be displayed on a cathode ray tube-a 
television monitor-or magnetically encoded and stored on videotape. Woody 
and Steina Vasulka articulated their video project in 1975 as primarily a 
"didactic" one, an inquiry into developing a "vocabulary" of electronic 
procedures unique to the construction of a "time/energy object." 56 Other 
artists also dedicated aesthetic and scientific research into interfaced 
electronic tools, anticipating what would be the television industry's 
eventual menu of "special effects." In the early 1970s, artists invented 
this imaging as a fundamental electronic lexicon, long before it became a 
pre-programmed stylistic embellishment.

By 1978, Woody Vasulka had broadened his discussion of electronic image 
vocabulary to include digital as well as analog codes.

"I want to point to the primary level of codes, notably the binary code 
operation, as a principle of imaging and image processing. This may 
require accepting and incorporating this primitive structure (the binary 
code) into our views of literacy, in the form of binary language, in order 
to maintain communication with the primary materials at all levels and 
from any distance. The dramatic moment of the transformation into a binary 
code of energy events in time, as they may be derived from light, or the 
molecular communication of sound, or from a force field, gravity, or other 
physical initiation, has to be realized, in order to appreciate the power 
of the organization and transformation of a code." 57

Throughout this period, artists, usually in conjunction with independent 
engineers, modified and invented video "instruments" or imaging tools, 
making possible the construction of new video and audio systems shaped by 
their individual aesthetic agendas. Throughout the late '60s, Experiments 
in Art and Technology (EAT) celebrated collaborations between visual and 
sound artists and scientists in a number of exhibitions, seeking to 
integrate new ideas in technology with contemporary culture. Labs and 
studios designed specifically to explore electronic imaging and facilitate 
collaborations between video artists and engineers included the National 
Center for Experiments in Television at KQED in San Francisco, the 
Television Lab at WNET in New York, the Experimental Television Center in 
Binghamton and later Owego, New York, the studios at the University of 
Illinois at Chicago Circle, and the School of the Art Institute of 
Chicago. 58

One aesthetic and technical issue carried over from music and experimental 
film that provoked the interest of early video makers was the structural 
relationship between electronic sound and image production. Nam June 
Paik's experimentation with the electromagnetic parameters of television 
and instrument design were extensions of his earlier activity in 
avant-garde music. Paik's 1963 Fluxus modifications of television sets 
with powerful magnets and his TV bra for cellist Charlotte Moorman were 
ironic gestures, exposing television's electronic materiality and toying 
with audience expectations around the TV set as an everyday site for 
Americans. meditation and cultural reception. He had earlier attacked and 
compromised pianos as American icons of German culture. In 1969 with 
engineer Shuya Abe, Paik pioneered the construction of the Paik-Abe video 
synthesizer, an instrument which enabled an artist to add color to the 
standard black and white video image. In the production of video, both 
sound and image are determined by the same fundamental analog electronic 
processes. Modular audio synthesizers, developed in the early '60s by 
Robert Moog and Don Buchla, were models for much of the video synthesizer 
development. Video artists' explorations into the physical materiality 
underlying visual, aural, and cognitive phenomena and into the fundamental 
structuring of sound and image through mathematical algorithms and machine 
systems, occupied common territory with aesthetic inquiries in music, 
experimental film, and sculpture at this time.

d. Video and performance and its audience

If video was celebrated by late '60s artists for its immediacy and ability 
to function within or capture a sense of real time, so too was performance 
art a "situation" or gesture which invigorated the present. Both video 
making and performance supported the investigation of the everyday, the 
vernacular, the conditions of active perception and information gathering 
in various settings. Portable video, with its immediate playback, as well 
as performance, foregrounded the producer/performer and his or her 
negotiation of a theatrical moment, and could be resituated in the streets 
or the studio, removed from a gallery setting. Both video and performance 
raised questions about the function of art at a time when modernism's 
validation of the transcendent aesthetic experience was challenged by 
artists. Barbara Rose commenting on the politics of art in 1969 observed: 
"The real change is not in forms of art, but in the function of art and 
the role of the artist in society, which poses an absolute threat to the 
existence of critical authority." 59

Performance art posited the aesthetic gesture in the body of the artist, 
with his or her personal tools, in the present tense, and video could 
function as one of those personal tools or as a recording instrument for 
documenting the situation. The subjectivity of the artist and/or the 
expectations of the audience could be investigated through performance. 
Vito Acconci, whose early work as a poet involved words and the page as 
space, remarked that his involvement with performance was a shift away 
from the material to understanding the self as an instrument and "an agent 
which attends to it, the world, out there." 60

Performance art had often functioned historically as a transgressive 
gesture. With its postwar experimental roots in the aleatory music of John 
Cage, who advocated the listener's focused "learning" so that "the hearing 
of the piece is his own action," 61 and in paradoxical Fluxus events, 
which embraced boredom in combination with excitement to "enrich the 
experiential world of our spectators, our co-conspirators," 62 performance 
art in the '60s and '70s undermined audiences' cultural habits and 
expectations. It also shared with multi-media happenings, "In a real, not 
an ideological way, a protest against museum conceptions of art-preserved 
and cherished." 63 Performance art clearly participated in an economic 
critique of the art establishment's investments in objects through its 
refusal to be commodified. Video installations, performance 
documentations, and process-oriented recordings at the time, shared with 
performance art an accommodation of chance events. As unedited 
documentation of live events, with grainy black and white images of 
unknown stability, video also had questionable archival, and therefore 
investment, value within the art market.

Performance assumes a relationship with a local audience, which shares to 
some degree in the risk-taking or experimental nature of performance work. 
Writer and artist Liza Bear cited the "heightened awareness of audience as 
an intrinsic element of the whole performing situation." 64 Vito Acconci's 
work in particular functioned as a kind of encyclopedic study of 
relationships constructed between the performer and his/her audience 
through the video monitor. His repertoire of entertaining, erotic, and 
threatening overtures catalogued the narcissism, seduction, and 
risk-taking in personal theater and its proto-narrative gestures by 
directly engaging the viewer in the construction of attentional needs. By 
exposing his intentions within his performances, he begged the audience's 
consideration of their own intentions and unstated assumptions. Acconci 
has written about the intimacy involved with video performance and its 
"fertile ground for relationship." 65

At the same time that artists were venturing structural studies of video 
performance and measures of intimacy, feminists drew on the intimacy of 
shared life and art experiences generated through conscious-raising groups 
and women-centered cultural scenes. Concentrating on the body as a 
performance vehicle as well as critiquing its representation in mass media 
and art history, feminist artists such as Hermine Freed, Joan Jonas, 
Martha Rosler, and Linda Montano, among others, used video and performance 
to assert and focus female presence and raise issues of gender and 
subjectivity in art. The invigorated confidence of women as performers and 
producers, their ambivalence about being the object of desire before the 
lens or audience, and their politicized relationship to audiences and 
institutional venues developed into a vital and complex discourse through 
video and other camera-based media like photography and film. Having 
attended the second Women's Video Festival in New York, reviewer Pat 
Sullivan offered her experience as audience member: "The striking feature 
of the festival was the revival of communal viewing...Being puzzled or 
amused or even angered by the responses of the other viewers forced me to 
search on the screen or in my mind for the origins of my own reactions." 
66

Tthe video project's relationship to its audience was assumed to be a 
structural aspect of work that expressed a range of radical subjective 
assertions. The early feminist insight that both cultural production and 
viewer reception were constructed according to gender was eventually 
extended to other "differences" such as class, race, and ethnicity. 
Community media activists worked to transform citizens from passive 
television consumers into active video producers who would reveal specific 
local agendas. Artists investigated the phenomenology of viewers' 
attention in a variety of performative situations which included 
installations of electronic instruments as well as personal gestures. And 
the counter-cultural "longing for group experiences that would transcend 
the limits of the individual ego...a craving for a sort of public love, a 
communal self-determination," 67 was reflected in part by viewers' 
openness to the experience of duration through largely unedited veriti 
video documentation.

The investigation of phenomenological and social relations mediated by 
video also inevitably introduced television, a paradoxically intimate and 
remote technology located in the home. Television's intimacy with audience 
was taken up in diverse west coast work by William Wegman, Ilene Segalove, 
Ant Farm and T.R. Uthco. In The Eternal Frame (1976) Ant Farm and 
T.R.Uthco re-enacted the media spectacle of the Kennedy assassination and 
revealed "inscribed audiences," 68 members of the general public who had 
originally witnessed television's public channeling of the horror and 
intimate details of the Kennedy assassination and who now inadvertently 
found themselves in the middle of public performances recorded in the 
streets of Dallas and San Francisco. The comments of those audiences 
confirmed the pseudo-familiality of the events; the audiences became 
un-alienated partners in an ironic disassembling of the authority of the 
news media.

The tourists standing in Dealey Plaza in 1976 may have been unwitting 
cultural collaborators, but, like the New York audiences for video and 
performance events, they were assumed to be important receivers of video 
by this first generation of video artists. Liza Bear, writing about 
performance in Avalanche in 1974, stated: "Part of content was an 
articulation of ... the audience's knowledge, beliefs, expectations of the 
artist in question ... and it was a consciousness of the audience as 
people who've come to see a particular artists' work, as people who know 
or work within the art context, and also, in some cases, a consciousness 
of the limitations of that context." 69 Critic Peggy Gale concluded that 
by "shifting away from the marketplace and the production of a precious 
object ... the role of the audience was redefined to play a part in the 
completion of the work through their response and feedback: the video 
model of simultaneous record and presentation, objectification and 
immediacy, was in effect reiterated." 70

e. Video and the construction of "reality"

Artists explored the immediacy and performative possibilities of video, 
producing work that legitimized new political and cultural assertions 
about subjective, lived experience and extended to audiences a considered 
and responsive function. These critical intimacies and ideological 
realities as they were mapped out through the video art and alternative 
media culture, however, were largely antithetical to the commodified 
"reality" portrayed through mass culture. Although the spectacle of 
television appealed to the intimate wants and desires of its audience or 
market, as Enzensberger elaborated, the relationship proffered through 
television inevitably resulted in a false intimacy: "Consumption as 
spectacle contains the promise that want will disappear. The deceptive, 
brutal, and obscene features of this festival derive from the fact that 
there can be no question of a real fulfillment of its promise...Trickery 
on such a scale is only conceivable if based on mass need." 71

Viewers' expectations of video art were complicated by their experiences 
living with television. That experience was described clearly at the end 
of the decade by Dan Graham:

"TV gains much of its effect from the fact that it appears to depict a 
world which is immediately and fully present. The viewer assumes that the 
TV image is both immediate and contiguous as to time with the shared 
social time and parallel "real world" of its perceivers-even when that may 
not be the case. This physical immediacy produces in the viewer(s) a sense 
of psychological intimacy where people on TV and events appear to directly 
address him or her." 72

The capacity of camera-based work to signify truthfulness, to claim to 
witness or represent reality, results in its legibility to many viewers as 
an "essential" and confirming realism. The documentary form, which 
introduces images and sounds as evidence, was embraced by many women and 
other previously marginalized producers working with video in the '70s, in 
part because seeing new images of self was undeniably powerful and 
evidenced the production of a new version of the real. At the same time, 
documentary representation was challenged by women and others as 
inevitably a product of a specifically focused lens and ideology, with 
edited inclusions, omissions, and censorships. 73

Contending ideas about the phenomenological, political, and subjective 
constructions of reality dominated cultural debate at the end of decade. 
New developments in narrative film theory, feminist theory, and the 
semiotics of image-making repositioned late '70s and early '80s art making 
within an emerging discourse that focused on the construction of 
subjectivity through the signifying practices of mass media, in which 
ideology was transacted through commodified and reproducible images. These 
cultural shifts, generally regarded as postmodern, forced a re-evaluation 
of critical strategies for artists in creating video "texts."

In the early '70s video makers articulated their opposition to 
television's codes and one-way distribution system, evident in assertions 
such as "VT is not TV," and exhibitions at new artists' centers titled "No 
TV," "Alternative TV," "Process TV," and "Natural TV." 74 The independent 
network at the end of the decade included media collectives, artists-run 
media centers, public access organizations, and artist collaborations with 
public television, and remained a vital alternative to corporate 
television, however marginalized those cultural scenes. Whether 
intentionally oppositional or mainstream, video artists, public access 
producers, and independent documentarians worked with technologies and 
cultural codes shared in part by the dominant communications media that in 
the United States, though not in all countries, was primarily a commercial 
venture. Independent work intended for television would inevitably be 
evaluated in terms of its marketing value, which would shadow its other 
intentions or merits. In the late '70s video artists and independent 
producers negotiated the contradictory possibilities of broadcast 
television's great visibility and potential censorship. David Antin 
pointed out that an artist's videotape ended, not when it was time for a 
commercial, but when the artist's intention was accomplished. 75

A decade of producing work, exploring relationships with audiences, and 
nurturing a viable alternative media infrastructure developed into a video 
cultural discourse which framed the capacity of a videotape to represent 
its maker's access to production technologies, to reveal its maker's 
strategies for approximating or constructing the "real," and to engage a 
performative interaction with an anticipated audience. Alternative video 
makers were able to map out diverse intentions as they developed modes of 
address specific to different audiences-the art world, public television, 
local community media. The video maker's various strategies-attentional, 
representational, formal, performative-for articulating an art or 
communications event remained a choice, and always measured the critical 
distance between the dominant language of commercial media and the video 
maker's independent voice.

3. Emergence of public funding

"Artists with electronic skill have transformed old TV sets into the 
dazzling 'light machines' that have appeared in galleries and museums, and 
some have developed video colorizers and synthesizers which permit 
electronic "painting." A relative few have penetrated the engineers' 
citadels of broadcast television to create experimental videotapes with 
the full palette of the switching consoles. A larger number, working since 
1967 with half-inch portable video systems from Japan, have explored the 
potential of videotape to reach out and open circuits of communication 
within a variety of small communities-giving substance to attitudes and 
concerns which monolithic broadcast television has ignored to a point of 
near obliteration ... This new area of Council [NYSCA] involvement 
suggests the extraordinary potential of the medium still to be explored as 
we go forward into tomorrow's wired nation.".Russell Connor 76

a. From collectives and community media to video access centers, public 
access centers, and public television labs

In the decade following the introduction of the portapak, video art and 
documentary practice developed within an alternative media infrastructure 
nurtured by the parallel growth of public arts funding. Early video makers 
had found that keeping up with the quickly evolving, high-end consumer 
tools of electronic media was expensive, even when resources were shared. 
Early video arts funding supported proposals by artists and collectives, 
and developed by the mid-'70s into funding programs for both individual 
artists and a nationwide system of regional media arts centers, some of 
which had evolved out of the early collectives.

By the late 1960s public funding for experimental and documentary film had 
been established through the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the 
New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA). Gerd Stern, an artist and 
early NYSCA staff consultant, outlined the rationale for NYSCA's early 
commitment to the new medium of video art as "a societal shift away from 
stockpiling a product ... [T]he Council had always maintained a very open 
attitude toward new art forms and a willingness to experiment, to take 
chances, to recognize the difficulties of arriving at tight value 
judgments in new situations where the standards were still nascent, 
embryonic." 77

Funding of not-for-profit cultural organizations and artists was promoted 
by public policy planners to encourage cultural research and design that 
would invigorate the marketplace and enhance the quality of life in a 
democracy. Some artists argued that public funding for the arts would 
force individuals to become institutionalized and could co-opt or blunt 
the edge of cultural dissent and creativity. Others countered that public 
funding would maintain a publicly accessible platform for discussion of 
cultural values which would contribute alternatives to a marketplace of 
ideas dominated by art collecting and the interests of commercial media. A 
more thorough tracking of the dialogue, initiatives, policies, and the 
negotiations between the funding institutions, legislative and judicial 
bodies, commercial interests, not-for-profit arts organizations, public 
access supporters, and artists' peer panel participation during this early 
period would be an important contribution to understanding the development 
of independent video, but must be developed elsewhere.

Artists in the late 60.s challenged the dominant aesthetics of modernist 
high culture and the economic assumptions of the art world establishment. 
Demonstrations at major museums protested the lack of support for living 
artists and called for a general reassessment of the business of art 
making and art dealing. A manifesto by the Art Workers Coalition in 1970 
declared: "Artworks are a cultural heritage that belongs to the people. No 
minority has the right to control them." Their demands challenged, among 
other conditions, the make-up of museum boards of directors, inattention 
to the work of minorities, and a lack of information about active local 
artists. 78 Although many galleries and museums supported new work and 
were responsive to criticism from working artists, the very existence of 
artist-run cooperatives and media and performance laboratories indicated 
the existing system was not adequately meeting the shifting needs and 
interests of a new generation of artists.

The late '60s saw the development of new structures to support the 
production and funding of video art. Some of the first experimental sites 
for "television art" were at educational television stations (soon to 
become "public television"): KQED in San Francisco, WGBH in Boston, and 
WNET in New York. Both KQED and WGBH received Rockefeller Foundation 
support in 1967 to establish experimental workshops, each taking different 
directions. Firmly committed to process-oriented research, the San 
Francisco project set up a studio for video instrumentation design as well 
as interdisciplinary (poetry, video, music, dance) television art 
projects. This became the National Center for Experiments in Television 
(NCET) in 1969. The Rockefeller Foundation also supported research in the 
development of media programs at the university level, and educators were 
invited to observe the electronic arts research happening at the NCET. 
WGBH's New Television Workshop produced a series of innovative programs in 
the late '60s, including the critically acclaimed The Medium is the Medium 
(1969), a television art magazine of early video experimentation.

The Television Laboratory at WNET was established in 1972 with support 
from the Rockefeller Foundation, NYSCA, and the NEA. Between 1974 and 
1984, WNET's residency program provided access to state-of-the-art 
broadcast video technology for five to eight artists each year. The 
station showcased a range of independent documentary and video art to its 
large New York market through series such as the "Video and Television 
Review" ("VTR") (1975-1976), hosted by artist/curator Russell Connor. 
Although the TV labs clearly represented a rare window for technical and 
programmatic experimentation within broadcast television, public 
television ultimately did not sustain its support for media art research 
and equipment access, nor did it continue to provide adequate outlets for 
independent work.

An accessible funding structure for the media arts emerged in the late 
.60s. NYSCA had been established in 1960 and was the nation's first 
government agency for support of the arts, mandated to respond to the art 
needs of New York City, the epicenter of the post-war international art 
world. Art was business, especially in New York, and the 1972 NYSCA annual 
report noted that the tourist trade as well as "two major industries of 
New York City-fashion and communications-are there ... because only there 
can be found the ideas and energy on which they depend." 79 Governor 
Nelson Rockefeller, in supporting NYSCA's expansion, could claim in 1971 
that more than 75 million attendances were reported at New York State arts 
events in the previous year. Between 1969 and 1970, NYSCA's overall budget 
increased almost ten fold from $2.3 million in 1969-1970 to $20.2 million 
in 1970-1971. This same period saw NYSCA film and television expenditures 
grow from $45,000 to almost $1.6 million, with over $500,000 going to new 
video projects. The NEA, established by Congress in 1965, initiated its 
Public Media Program in 1967 and by 1971 was spending $1.26 million on 
film and television art. By the end of the decade the NEA was spending 
$8.4 million on media arts (film and video) and committed to supporting a 
network of regional media arts centers.

NYSCA's early and substantial funding for video was critical in the start 
up of diverse projects throughout New York State. Many video collectives 
as well as museums and libraries received support in 1970-71, NYSCA's 
first year of media funding. The list revealed a broad range of 
initiatives and included, in New York City: Shirley Clarke's T.P. Video 
Space Troupe, People's Video Theater, Raindance, Global Village, Media 
Equipment Resource Center (MERC), and the Artists' TV Lab at WNET; in 
Brooklyn: Operation Discovery, a cable program on the cultural life of the 
Bedford-Stuyvestant neighborhood; in Ithaca: Collaborations of Art, 
Science, and Technology (CAST); on Long Island: Port Washington Public 
Library; in Rochester: the Videofreex at the Rochester Museum of Science 
and the Visual Studies Workshop; and in Binghamton: Community Center for 
Television.

Often building on the existing media collectives, new media centers and 
multi-disciplinary artist-run spaces were required to be incorporated as 
not-for-profit organizations. Expanding on the collectives' communications 
paradigm, these emerging sites of alternative cultural activity typically 
offered production facilities, training workshops, and active exhibition 
programs that positioned video within a critical environment of other 
disciplines that often included experimental, documentary, and narrative 
films, music, performance, photography, and the visual arts. Screenings by 
visiting artists were common and were often accompanied by discussions 
with local audiences about the work and news about the growing field. Many 
media centers and museums published their own bulletins, catalogs, regular 
program notes, and posters. This ephemeral material, in combination with 
contemporaneous periodicals, catalogs, and critical journals, offers a 
vivid picture of alternative media activity during this first decade.

A respected video art and alternative media discourse was disseminated by 
publications such as Radical Software, Afterimage, Vidicon, and 
Televisions. Avalanche, Art News, and other arts magazines featured 
special issues on video. The National Federation of Local Cable 
Programmers published The NFLCP Newsletter, which was succeeded by 
Community Television Review in 1979. The Independent began publication by 
the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers (AIVF) in 1976, and 
Video 80 started publication in 1980 in San Francisco. Sightlines, 
published by the Educational Film Library Association, regularly reviewed 
independent videotapes. Video distributors such as Electronic Arts 
Intermix, Castelli-Sonnabend, Anna Canepa, Video Data Bank, Third World 
Newsreel, California Newsreel, Art Com, and Women Make Movies were 
critical in building and sustaining informational conduits among artists, 
exhibitors, curators, and educators.

Exhibitions at galleries and museums in the late '60s and early 
'70s-including the Howard Wise and Castelli Galleries (New York City), the 
DeSaisset Museum (Santa Clara, California), and the University Art Museum 
(Berkeley, California)-helped to legitimize video art within established 
art institutions. Especially important was the founding of video 
departments at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern 
Art, the Everson Museum, and the Long Beach Museum of Art, whose curators 
regularly positioned video art within highly visible contemporary 
exhibitions, such as the Whitney Biennials.

At a 1983 conference of the National Alliance of Media Arts Centers 
(NAMAC), a three-year-old organization which claimed 80 institutional 
members, speakers asserted that media arts centers had "now become a 
significant presence in our culture." NAMAC's chairman, Ron Green, 
identified the "cultural lack" that media arts centers addressed:

"Blacks and women may have realized that lack inherent in the images of 
them that has been perpetrated by the media art of the film and television 
industry, but American society did not ... Democracy was understood [by 
our forefathers] to require universal education, specifically the ability 
of all citizens to read and write in order not only to assimilate the 
issues on which they would vote, but also to contribute to the formulation 
and presentation of those issues through writing. Since much, if not most, 
of our information two centuries later is presented through the media 
instead of writing, and since the media are not accessible to most of us 
(nor even to most of our best media artists), this requirement of our 
political system is not being met." 80

Artists, independent documentarians, and public access activists were 
joined by curators, programmers, distributors, and librarians who 
continued to support media culture on many fronts. By the middle of the 
'70s the alternative media network featured overlapping but largely 
independent organizations, funding infrastructures, and audiences. These 
projects may have shared basic assumptions about the importance of media 
arts and distribution systems, but were testing and reconfiguring 
different identities and survival strategies. The vision and work that 
extended the alternative media arts infrastructure throughout the '70s 
would be faced with an ongoing struggle for legitimacy and survival 
requiring public visibility and support. Green addressed the field:

"The biggest problem we are having in seeing the future stems from scale 
illiteracy. Through hard work, innovation, and persistence we have made a 
field where there was none ... There can be little doubt that the price of 
genuine cultural pluralism in this country is in the billions of dollars. 
... Britain recently began providing large financing to genuinely 
independent, even avant-garde, media artists under the new BBC fourth 
channel ... It is common knowledge that our American public 
telecommunications system never had a chance; it has always been 
ludicrously under-financed. How can we who promote the independent media 
arts ever have expected a system with enormous capital and personnel 
expenses, and impossibly weak financial structures, to be seriously 
concerned about cultural pluralism? To expect that is a manifestation of 
our illiteracy of scale." 81

As regional media arts centers expanded primarily through public and 
private arts funding, the cable industry was growing. Public access 
facilities proliferated around the country, and both the local benefits 
and the economic and political costs of public access continued to be 
challenged. In developing public access facilities through cable franchise 
agreements, media activists inevitably found themselves up against the 
pragmatic need to work with established power structures-city governments, 
cable companies, and the state and federal regulators. Cable channels 
remained a public forum for speech protected by the First Amendment not 
available on broadcast channels, 82 and access operators supported the 
education of a diverse community of users. However, access organizations 
occasionally found their political and financial support threatened by 
providing uncensored access to large local audiences. They found their 
goals of first-come, first-served access positioned precariously between 
potential critics of free speech on cable and their constituencies-between 
city officials and their voters, and between cable companies and their 
paying customers.

These tensions were also played out in the courts, where federal 
regulators contended that they must arbitrate between "social engineering" 
by public access advocates and protecting a "free market" for the 
expanding cable industry. In 1972 the FCC had established access 
requirements for the cable industry, which many cable operators had 
promoted. At this time access provisions served the enlightened 
self-interest of the cable industry which needed to garner the support of 
municipalities and the public as it faced competition from the broadcast 
industry. The subscription-based cable industry was portrayed as a threat 
to free television by the broadcasters. By the late '70s, however, the 
cable industry challenged the financial burden of complying with access 
provisions in the courts. In 1979 the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the 
cable industry, stating that the FCC did not have the statutory authority 
to require cable companies to support public access. In what would remain 
a shifting regulatory landscape, public access organizations joined forces 
with the National League of Cities to lobby Congress for new 
communications legislation under consideration at the end of the decade. 
The Cable Communications Policy Act of 1984 mandated that cable companies 
support public access channels, prohibited cable operators from asserting 
editorial control over access producers, and declared that public access 
regulations "serve a most significant and compelling government 
interest-promotion of the basic underlying values of the First Amendment 
itself." 83

Although many media producers in the early '70s believed that their work 
functioned in opposition to television, by mid-decade documentarians 
challenged the absence of independent points of view on broadcast TV. AIVF 
had formed in 1974 to advocate for more public funding for independent 
film and video makers. In 1976, 15 independent video production groups 
lobbied the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), arguing that 
independents should have more funding and equipment access through public 
television. In 1977 and 1978 AIVF testified at the second Carnegie 
Commission, charged with evaluating the first decade of public television. 
AIVF also testified before the Congressional Subcommittee on 
Communications, examining public television in its revision of the 
Communications Act. Even though the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act had 
specified that high quality programs be obtained from "diverse sources," 
AIVF charged:

"Public television at this time does not reflect the rich diversity of 
American social, cultural, and political issues. The reliance on in-house 
staff productions and British imports has limited both the subjects and 
the substance offered. In a society which relies heavily on electronic 
media for information, independent video and filmmakers are being denied 
the full exercise of their constitutional rights, and the public is denied 
access to the diverse viewpoints and vigorous debate which are intrinsic 
to informed self-government." 84

The 1978 Public Telecommunications Financing Act authorized specific 
appropriations for independents, although the distribution of those monies 
would continue to be contentious. A Public Trust, the 1979 report of the 
second Carnegie Commission on public television, also mandated programming 
diversity and financial support for independents: "Americans have the 
capacity to rebuild their local communities, their regions, and indeed 
their country, with tools no more formidable than transistors and 
television tubes..." 85 These recommendations would not be interpreted and 
actualized, however, until after the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, 
which proved to be a period of shrinking government support for public 
television.

By the end of the '70s, new satellite technology also contributed to the 
vision of yet another kind of independent network. Communications Update, 
for example, a Manhattan public access cable series started up by Liza 
Bear in 1979, produced informative programs on the World Administrative 
Radio Conference (WARC). WARC is an international UNESCO conference held 
every 20 years to determine policies for the allocation of access to the 
electromagnetic spectrum and the management of telecommunications 
satellites. Anticipating the confluence of cable, telephone, and digital 
information services, artists, independent producers, and public policy 
planners continued to raise questions about access to new and existing 
telecommunications technologies. 86

Independents' relationships with television would continue to raise 
fundamental questions. For video art or documentary work to reach a 
commercial television market, would access to broadcast technology be 
necessary to make that work competitive? Throughout the '70s public and 
private funders pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into industrial 
grade and occasionally broadcast quality equipment for regional media 
centers. Technology for video was evolving rapidly, and it was clear that 
this need for regular retooling would not abate. If independent work 
aspired to television's mass audiences, could additional support be 
expected from public television or even commercial television for ongoing 
equipment upgrades? How could artists afford the time to experiment in an 
editing suite and/or exercise the kind of control over post-production 
decisions if sophisticated tools were only available with professional 
editing assistance? What was the relationship between broadcast 
television's special effects technology and the independently-designed 
tools that had been invented by pioneering engineers and artists? These 
questions confronted individual artists and funders in consultation with 
peer panels, who, in determining which projects should receive funding, 
inevitably debated issues ranging from the structures of access to new 
technologies to promising and exhausted expressive cultural forms.

By the late '70s a media arts infrastructure in collaboration with public 
and private funders had expanded the production and exhibition 
opportunities for emerging artists, foregrounding new art forms and 
becoming a critical factor in the development of new audiences for this 
work, but not without significant resistance. Mapping the trajectory of 
public support for the arts, David Trend quoted a 1981 Heritage Foundation 
document written during the Reagan administration that accused the NEA of 
having grown "more concerned with the politically calculated goals of 
social policy than with the arts it was created to support. To accomplish 
goals of social intervention and change ... the Endowment...serve(s) 
audiences rather than art, vocal constituencies rather than individually 
motivated artistic impulses." 87 A struggle, which would eventually be 
described as a cultural war, was underway for the legitimacy and survival 
of an independent media arts practice and infrastructure, one that by the 
early 80s was more alternative than oppositional, and was described 
accommodatingly by NAMAC as a "counterculture ... only in comparison to 
the mass media." 88

How could an alternative media cultural practice be validated by a 
delivery system that depended on legislators for appropriations and 
reviewers for mainstream visibility by the end of the decade? Martha 
Rosler, who has written extensively about the cultural delivery system 
during this period, remarked that "video's marginality produces shrunken 
or absent critical apparatuses ... This leaves the theorizing to people 
with other vested interests." 89 Peer Bode, who worked in an artist-run 
access center, reflected on the late '70s:

"The people who then wrote about media gradually were not practitioners 
but actually came to observe video from other disciplines. At this point 
the understanding of the value of issues around labor and production were 
lost ... Various making communities and language communities [recognize] 
that written language still has a real legitimizing power within the 
culture, and the commercial publications that ended up as a forum for 
writers were often not interested in those projects which were not 
commercially based. As any writer will tell you, within the art magazines, 
one could only represent what happened in those not-for-profit alternative 
art centers to a very small extent because the publications survived on a 
commercial advertising base." 90

By the end of the decade independent video art and documentary making had 
been integrated into academia through art, media art, and communications 
departments that had given tenure to early video practitioners. Though the 
production of independent media continued through university programs, 
media art centers, and public access centers, the '80s also saw cultural 
theory take up the study of the dominant genres of narrative filmmaking 
and television, emphasizing a critical ideological reading of popular 
culture as seen in its internationally disseminated products, Hollywood 
cinema and television. Such writing acknowledged the insights of 
independent video and filmmakers occasionally, but rarely the alternative 
media institutional infrastructure that supported their independent 
cultural production, nor the encoding of challenging that production 
system through an art work's invention of signifying practices. 91 With 
the growth of cultural theory as an academic discipline, an oppositional 
or ambivalent posture to the dominant media often took the form of 
critical writing rather than critical media production.

b.Conclusion

Video was spawned at an historical moment when personal and communal 
experimentation and institutional invention made sense within a widely 
embraced vision of a radically changing society. Inspired by the 
availability of the portapak, a personal media tool, and emerging at a 
time when culture was widely acknowledged as political terrain, video 
makers performed initiatives which sought to radically reconfigure local 
art and communications structures, invigorating their respective 
communities' capacities for informational and participatory feedback. 
Communications production and reception were re-inscribed in contemporary 
culture by early video independents as social relations, which could be 
negotiated by ordinary people and art scenes as well as by media 
corporations and advertisers. Video makers' work queried the dimensions 
and structures of the television's address-how far, to whom, how 
expensive, does it feedback, with what images does it create, engage, 
transform, misrepresent, and censor? Artists and independent producers 
integrated production, exhibition, distribution, transmission, audience 
feedback, and media education into their work, and they invited the 
cultural participation of individuals as artists, critics, scientists, 
citizens, and educators, creating a vital alternative infrastructure.

In a period that advocated for expanded consciousness and a critical 
reassessment of institutionalized authority, artists engaged various 
attentional constructs using information fed back from a newly accessible 
electronic time-based medium and experimented with the fundamental 
structures of a new image language available through electronic materials. 
Women producers asserted a gendered subjectivity, and both women and men 
transgressed viewers' assumptions primarily through performance-based 
work. Artists enlisted video in an expansive documentary exploration of 
the vernacular, the everyday, as well as investigations of dominant social 
institutions. A negotiation of attentional terrain with viewers, the 
sharing of authority in the work through ongoing efforts to develop 
structures that would guarantee broad access to production, and the 
recognition of audience as subjective participant in the work and social 
partner in sustaining cultural scenes characterized the performance of 
video art and communications projects throughout its first decade.

A fundamental speaking point of this first generation of video artists was 
that to engage a critical relationship with a televisual society you must 
primarily participate televisually. Their art, performance, and 
documentary projects are available today as tapes, which deserve 
conservation and study as part of an extensive moving image "literature," 
as do the alternative stages and scenes supported by the surviving 
independent media infrastructure.

Video art and alternative media production was developed by artists in the 
late '60s and early '70s as a public dialogue about new cultural forms and 
access to communications technology distributed through a proliferation of 
new sites for exchange. The revisiting of that period through an 
historical survey is, in part, an effort to link the cultural insights and 
strategies of portable video's first decade with the present conditions 
for producing media culture. Attention to the video projects of the late 
'60s and '70s, those surveyed in this project and others yet to be 
rediscovered, is timely in view of the advent of international media 
hardware and software expansion and new decentralized multi-media 
networks. The democratic use of these tools can only be realized with 
considerable efforts toward widespread media literacy, a necessary 
extension of basic reading and writing skills.

Such an education for media cultural fluency must encompass access to and 
experience with production tools and an understanding of the interpretive 
structures of moving image media "literatures"-video, film, sound, digital 
multi-media, radio, cinema, television, internet-that have been produced 
to date. It is necessary to beware of the emancipatory claims of new 
technologies, as well as the liberal notion that access to production 
alone will bring about critical participation in view of the capacity of 
the mass media to assimilate new cultural forms. However, the early '70s 
participatory affirmation of an alternative media practice bears 
amplification at the present time in order to reconsider the efforts of 
that earlier generation to initiate new forms of cultural exchange, and to 
share the authority of technologically intensive cultural production with 
diverse audiences and local communities. In supporting the production of a 
vital, multi-vocal, and accessible contemporary media culture, artists and 
educators must continue to question-what were the cultural issues 
negotiated by past bodies of work, who has training and access to 
increasingly sophisticated tools, and how can diverse audiences approach 
the work produced-and on a much broader scale than has been accomplished 
to date.

1. Sylvia Harvey, May '68 and Film Culture. London: British Film 
Institute, 1978, p. 56.
2. Beryl Korot and Phyllis Gershuny, editors, "Table of Contents," Radical 
Software, 1:1, 1970, p. 1.
3. Chris Hill, "Interview with Woody Vasulka,"The Squealer, Summer 1995, 
p. 6.
4. Allan Kaprow, Assemblages, Environments and Happenings. New York: 
Abrams, 1966. [Excerpted in Charles Harrigan and Paul Wood, editors, Art 
in Theory. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992, p. 708.]
5. Sohnya Sayres, Anders Stephanson, Stanley Aronowitz, and Fredric 
Jameson, editors,The '60s Without Apology. Minneapolis: University of 
Minnesota Press, 1984, p. 20.
6. Ibid, p. 2.
7. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties. New York: Bantam Books, 1987, p. xv.
8. Students for a Democratic Society, "Port Huron Statement," The Sixties 
Papers, edited by Judith Albert and Stewart Albert. New York: Praeger, 
1984, p. 181.
9. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964, p. 
251.
10. See Michael Renov, "Early Newsreel: The Construction of a Political 
Imaginary for the New Left," Afterimage, 10:10, February 1987, pp.
12-15; distribution catalogs from Third World Newsreel and California 
Newsreel; for a history of the underground press see David Armstrong, A 
Trumpet to Arms. Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, 1981.
11 . Hans Magnus Enzensberger, "Constituents of a Theory of the Media," 
Video Culture, edited by John Hanhardt. Rochester, New York: Visual 
Studies Workshop Press, 1986, p. 98. See also Todd Gitlin. "16 Notes on 
Television," Tri-Quarterly Review, Nos. 23/24, Winter-Spring 1972, pp. 
325-366.
12 . "Time Scan," Televisions , 4:2, Summer 1976, p. 7.
13 . Susan Sontag, "On Culture and the New Sensibility," Against 
Interpretation.. New York: Dell Publishing, 1966, p. 299.
14 . See Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the 
Animal and the Machine. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1948; Buckminster 
Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. New York: Simon and 
Schuster, 1969; Gregory Bateson, Steps To an Ecology of Mind. New York: 
Ballantine Books, 1972.
15 . David Antin, "Video: The Distinctive Features of the Medium," Video 
Art, edited by Susanne Delahanty. Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary 
Art, 1975, p. 57.
16 . Michael Shamberg and Raindance Corporation, Guerrilla Television.. 
New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1971, p. 9.
17 . Parry Teasdale, Unpublished interview with author, May 1995.
18 . Philip Mallory Jones, Unpublished interview with author, July 1995.
19. Beryl Korot and Phylis Gershuny, editors, "Masthead," Radical 
Software, 1:1, 1970, p.1.
20. Portola Institute, The Whole Earth Catalog. San Francisco: 1969, p. 1.
21. Beryl Korot and Phyllis Gershuny, editors, "Cultural Data Banks," 
Radical Software, 1:2, 1970, p. 19.
22. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, "Constituents of a Theory of the Media," p. 
105.
23. Ken Marsh, "Alternatives for Alternative Media-PeopleUs Video 
TheaterUs Handbook," Radical Software, 1:2, 1970, p. 18.
24. Ken Marsh and Elliot Glass, Unpublished interview with author, June 
1992.
25. Ralph Lee Smith, "The Wired Nation," The Nation, 210:19, May 18, 1970, 
p. 606.
26. Roger Newell, "Minority Cable Report," Televisions, 6:3, November 
1978, p. 10.
27. Dorothy Heneaut and Bonnie Klein, "Challenge for Change," Radical 
Software, 1:1, 1970, p. 11.
28. Alternate Media Center, Alternate Media Center at NewYork University 
School of the Arts, Summer 1972, p. 11.
29. "1986," Community Television Review, 9:2, Summer 1986, p. 59.
30. Walter A. Dale, "The Port Washington Experiment," Film Library 
Quarterly, Summer 1972, p. 23.
31. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, "Television and the Politics of Liberation," 
The New Television: A Public/Private Art, edited by Douglas Davis and 
Alison Simmons. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977, p. 263.
32. Parry Teasdale, Unpublished interview with author, May 1995.
33. "Ralph Lee Smith Meets Access," Community Television Review, 9:2, 
Summer, 1986, p. 22.
34. Chris Hill, "Interview with Woody Vasulka," The Squealer, Summer 1995, 
p. 7.
35. Roger House, "Bed-Stuy Voices from the Neighborhood," Afterimage, 
19:1, Summer 1991, p. 3.
36. Fredric Jameson, "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture," Signatures 
of the Visible. New York: Routledge, 1992, p. 23.
37. Hollis Frampton, "The Withering Away of the State of the Art," 
Artforum, December 1974, p. 50.
38. Robert Morris, "Notes on Sculpture, Part 4: Beyond Objects," Artforum, 
7:8, April 1969, p. 53.
39. Clement Greenberg, "Towards a Newer Laocoon," Collected Essays and 
Criticism, Vol. I: Perception and Judgments, 1939-44, edited by John 
O'Brian. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986, p. 28.
40. Dick Higgins, "Intermedia," foew+ombyhnw. New York: Something Else 
Press, 1969, p. 15.
41. Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood," Artforum, Summer 1967, p. 44.
42. Annette Michelson, "Robert Morris: An Aesthetic of Transgression," 
Robert Morris. Baltimore: Garamond/Pridemark Press and Corcoran Gallery of 
Art, 1969, p. 23.
43. Lizzie Borden, "The New Dialectic,"Artforum, April 1974, p. 44.
44. Morris, Robert, "Notes on Sculpture, Part 4: Beyond Objects," p. 54.
45. Dick Higgins, "Structural Researches," foew+ombyhnw. New York: 
Something Else Press, 1969, p. 149.
46. Paul Sharits, "A Cinematics Model for Film Studies in Higher 
Education," Film Culture , No. 65-66, 1978, p. 49.
47. Malcolm LeGrice, Abstract Film and Beyond. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977, 
p. 152.
48. Hermine Freed, "Where Do We Come From? Where Are We? Where Are We 
Going?" Video Art, edited by Beryl Korot and Ira Schneider. New York: 
Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1976, p. 210.
49. Antin, David, "Video: The Distinctive Features of the Medium," p. 60.
50. Joanna Gill, "Video, The State of the Art," New York: Rockefeller 
Foundation, June 1975. Reprinted in Eigenwelt des Apparate-welt: Pioneers 
of Electronic Arts, edited by David Dunn, Steina and Woody Vasulka. Linz: 
Ars Electronica, 1992, p. 64.
51. Jud Yalkut, "Interview with Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider," Radical 
Software, 1:1, 1970, p. 9.
52. David Antin, "Video: The Distinctive Features of the Medium," p. 60.
53. Dan Graham, "Film and Video: Video as Present Time," 
Video/Architecture/Television.. Halifax: Nova Scotia School of Art and 
Design Press, 1979, p. 62.
54. Dan Graham, "Feedback," p. 69.
55. Bob Devine, "The Long Take as Body Envelope," Phos, 1:1, March 1978, 
p. 6.
56. Woody Vasulka and Scott Nygren, "Didactic Video: Organizational Models 
of the Electronic Image," Afterimage, 3:4, October 1975, p. 9.
57. Woody Vasulka, "A Syntax of Binary Images," Afterimage, 6:1-2, Summer 
1978, p. 20.
58. For a thorough source on artists working with engineers see the 
exhibition catalog of early instruments and tapes organized by the 
Vasulkas, Eigenwelt Der Apparate-Welt: Pioneers of Electronic Art, edited 
by David Dunn and Steina and Woody Vasulka. Linz, Austria: Ars 
Electronica, 1992.
59. Barbara Rose, "Problems of Criticism V: The Politics of Art, Part, 
II," Artforum, 7:5, January 1969, p. 50.
60. Vito Acconci, Lecture at Albright-Knox Art Gallery recorded by 
Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, New York, June 1995.
61. Susan Sontag, "On Culture and the New Sensibility," p. 300.
62. Dick Higgins, "Boredom and Danger," foew+ombyhnw. New York: Something 
Else Press, 1969, p. 123.
63. Roselee Goldberg, Performance: Live Art 1909 to Present. New York: 
Harry Abrams, 1979, p. 81.
64. Liza Bear, Avalanche, 1:1, May-June 1974, p. 1.
65. Vito Acconci, "10 Point Plan for Video," Video Art, edited by Beryl 
Korot and Ira Schneider. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1976, p. 
8.
66. Pat Sullivan, "WomenUs Video Festival," [No publisher] 1973.
67. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties, p. xix.
68. Patricia Mellencamp, Indiscretions. Bloomington: University of Indiana 
Press, p. 58.
69. Liza Bear, Avalanche, p. 1.
70. Peggy Gale, "A History in 4 Moments," Mirror Machine, edited by Janine 
Marchessault.Toronto: YYZ Books, 1995, p. 56.
71. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, "Constituents of a Theory of the Media," p. 
109. See also Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Red and Black 
Books, 1977.
72. Dan Graham, "Film and Video: Video as Present Time," p. 63.
73. See Martha Gever, "Feminist Video-Early Projects," Afterimage, 11:1-2, 
Summer 1983; Julia LeSage,"The Political Aesthetics of the Feminist 
Documentary Film," Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 3:4, Fall 1978; Allan 
Sekula. "Dismantling Modernism," Photography Against the Grain. Halifax: 
Press of Nova Soctia School of Art and Design, 1984; Laura Mulvey, "Visual 
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Screen, Autumn 1975.
74. Michael Shamberg and Raindance Corporation, Guerrilla Television., p. 
89.
75. David Antin, "The Distinctive Features of the Medium," p. 3.
76. Russell Connor, "TV/Media," NYSCA Annual Report 1971-1972. New York: 
New York State Council on the Arts, 1972, p. 23.
77. Gerd Stern, "Support of Television Arts by Public Funding," The New 
Television: A Public/ Private Art. edited by Douglas Davis and Alison 
Simmons. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977, p. 144.
78. Lucy Lippard, "Art Workers Coalition: not a history," Studio 
International, November 1970, p. 171.
79. Eric Larabee, "The Arts and Government in New York State," NYSCA 
Annual Report 1971-1972, New York: New York State Council on the Arts, 
1972, p. 23.
80. Ronald Green, "The Media Arts in Transition," The Media Arts In 
Transition, edited by Bill Horrigan. Minneapolis: The Walker Arts Center, 
1983, p. 9.
81. Ibid, p. 9.
82. To date, speech on cable systems, including public access channels, is 
protected by the First Amendment because viewers must exercise choice in 
accessing cable (they cannot receive cable without paying for it); speech 
on broadcast channels is limited because anyone (children, etc.) can 
access the broadcast programs by simply turning on a TV set. See L. Brown, 
"Free Expression is an Unwelcome Rider on the Runaway Technology Train," 
Community Television Review, Summer-Fall 1980.
83. Susan Bednarczyk, "NFLCP: The Way It Was," Community Television 
Review, 9:2, Summer 1986, p.44.
84. John J. O'Connor, "The Outsiders Want a Bigger Piece of the Pie," New 
York Times, March 26, 1978.
85. Deirdre Boyle, Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television, Revisited. New 
York: Oxford Press, 1996.
86. Nolan Bowie, "Parting Shots: An Expanded Agenda," The Social Impact of 
Television, A Research Agenda for the 1980s. Aspen Colorado: The Aspen 
Institute, October 1980.
87. David Trend, "Rethinking Media Activism," Socialist Review, 23:2, 
February 1993, p. 7.
88. Ronald Green, "The Media Arts in Transition," p. 9.
89. Martha Rosler, "Shedding the Utopian Moment," Illuminating Video, 
edited by Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer. San Francisco: Aperture, 1990, p. 
49.
90. Chris Hill, "Interview with Peer Bode," The Squealer, September 1996, 
p. 4.
91. Patricia Mellencamp, Indiscretions, p. 205.